SEO Term Definition
Negative SEO
Negative SEO refers to malicious tactics used to harm a competitor's search rankings — such as building toxic backlinks to their site, scraping and duplicating their content, or launching hacking attacks.
Reviewed by Alexander Yarovenko · Updated: 2026-06-25
What is Negative SEO?
Negative SEO is the practice of using black-hat tactics against a competitor's website with the intent of harming their search engine rankings. While rare, it does occur — particularly in highly competitive niches.
Common Negative SEO Tactics
- Toxic link building — pointing hundreds or thousands of spammy links at a competitor's site to trigger a Penguin penalty
- Content scraping — copying a site's content and publishing it elsewhere to trigger duplicate content issues
- Fake reviews — flooding Google Business Profile with fake negative reviews
- Hacking — injecting spammy content or redirects into a site
- Crawl attacks — overwhelming a server to slow load times
How to Protect Yourself
- Monitor your backlink profile regularly with Ahrefs or Google Search Console's Links report
- Set up Google Alerts for your brand name to catch content scraping
- Use the Disavow Tool if you notice a sudden influx of toxic links
- Keep software updated to prevent hacking vulnerabilities
Note: Google's algorithms are increasingly good at ignoring clearly artificial negative SEO attempts. Most spammy link attacks are automatically discounted rather than causing penalties.